they had fucking merch
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Journalists still asking if this was planned or it just "happened" somehow.
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Melissa Gira Grant
@melissagira
staff writer » A WOMAN IS AGAINST THE LAW TK + PLAYING THE WHORE » » rep
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We really lost some clarity when “toxic masculinity” started replacing “patriarchy.”
No state should have the right to force someone to remain pregnant against their will, when do we just get to claim that plainly
The NYT is pushing a polite version of the now-standard right wing propaganda that trans people are predators endangering women, which is to say, those working on the Opinion desk are preparing liberals to accept the the already-escalating fascist violence against trans people.
Feeling like I am running out of ways to say that we’re in the middle of an open fascist street mobilization, with the tacit support of a political party and its media organs
The arrest of Lizelle Herrera should be a massive wake-up call for anyone wondering about “the post-Roe” world. This arrest was under Roe. So were the arrests for pregnancy outcomes before this one.
I know this isn’t an original response but it feels like the parallel we’re facing down isn’t Germany in the 1930s, it’s the 1890s in the United States
No one asked but here’s tips for media new to covering police and protest:
- Damaging property isn’t “violence”
- Protests don’t “turn” violent if what you are seeing is police escalation
- Police have routinely arrested media
- Protestors are not a monolith
- Cops lie
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With an avalanche of early Black Friday promotions, @wirecutter separates the deals from the duds. nyti.ms/3cMMnA5
With respect: trans journalists have written that this was coming for years, but feminist and political media alike ignored or discounted the work they did which is seemingly being re-done now twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte
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Much, much more broad than overturning Obergefell—this “grooming” accusation is meant to normalize the surveillance and criminalization of LGBTQ people, at the hands of police, school administrators, child welfare agencies, admin of public benefits…
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This is an intentional rhetorical shift for conservatives. They are starting to plant the seeds and re-up old talking points that LGBTQ adults cannot be trusted around children. This is how they start to overturn marriage equality, folks. twitter.com/MattGertz/stat…
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Protestors gathering near Trump Tower.
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Do I even need to say it? Abortion criminalization will not be cops pulling over white moms and white daughters on the highway crossing state lines. It will be nurses reporting you to the police for a miscarriage. It will be cops in the ER asking to go through your phone.
You could run an abortion fund for a year with one or two minutes worth of these donations
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NEWS: Democratic donors shattered ActBlue's all-time record for donations in an hour after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
Democrats gave $6.2 million in the 9 pm hour.
Then they broke the record again in 10 pm hour.
More than $100,000 per minute.
nytimes.com/live/2020/09/1
It’s time to defund the police 🚨 (new, from me)
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When you are narrating the massacre thru the eyes of the vet who helped stop the massacre by disarming the gunmen, but not quoting queer and trans community, intentionally or not, media is allowing anti-LGBTQ violence to become a story about good straight people.
the already-questionable "no gay wedding websites" case at SCOTUS is—worse? they claim "stewart" asked for a site for his wedding to "mike." i called stewart. he's straight and married.
I’m at the Christian nationalist abortion bounty hunt I’m at the thousand year flood I’m at the combination Christian nationalist abortion bounty hunt thousand year flood
Nothing new about a platform building itself on the backs of sex workers’ labor only to TOS them off the site when they don’t think they need them anymore (and when said platform wants to stay in the good graces of financial institutions)
New moral panic just dropped
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Today I’m writing the U.S. Attorney General requesting an investigation into @OnlyFans for promoting, and profiting from, online prostitution. I encourage @TheJusticeDept to vigorously protect vulnerable people from platforms that promote coercive immoral and sexual activity.
ProPublica put its considerable resources to work, and has establishes what sex workers have long known: police lie. NYPD lied about shifting to arresting customers, and a very small handful of undercovers continue to target sex workers in low-income communities of color.
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New: Some NYPD officers who police the sex trade, driven by overtime pay, go undercover to round up as many “bodies” as they can with little evidence. Almost no one they arrest is white. propub.li/37GhtGv
“When everything’s back to normal, will we accept cities cutting off their poorest residents’ water, or evicting the sick, or throwing someone in jail because they can’t afford to pay a fine?“ slate.com/news-and-polit
Really odd to see the NYT ed board use the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club’s defense of drag brunches in Texas this summer as “chilling” example of potential “violence from the left” (gift link: nytimes.com/2022/11/26/opi)
I will always remember how the 2020 campaign began: with anons lecturing Chelsea Manning about how a prosecutor is a hero
Anti-trans conspiracy theories aired among members of Congress today and “That’s not fucking true” is correct in substance and style washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/
Sex trafficking conspiracy theories are really popular with people who would rather imagine networks of shadowy predators systematically targeting young children on TikTok than help the queer & trans teens escaping family violence and who end up trading sex for a place to stay.
When social media platforms claim they can’t possibly take down all the accounts that make persistent violent, racist, sexist threats, maybe it’s just because they’ve thrown all their resources at deleting strippers and porn performers instead
If anyone’s curious, the Times put its story on the Missouri gender affirming care ban—a policy which cited their reporting—in today’s paper on A17
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Replying to @Esqueer_
This follows the Missouri AG directly citing Emily Bazelon's New York Times Magazine article to ban gender affirming care for trans adults.
People absolutely misunderstand a prosecutor’s job: they choose who to punish and how harshly
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Complaints about @SenKamalaHarris because of actions in her previous position as a prosecutor seem to be based on a misunderstanding: a prosecutor's job is to enforce the laws, not undermine or defy them. A Senator's job is to write the laws. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/
This misses the point: legal, medical, and social discrimination is the norm for trans people in the US. When media figures push transphobic views, pitched as if they are one of the few brave truth tellers amongst a sea of affirming conformity, they are simply lying. To profit.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Media transphobia is also driven by lucrative niche market. Even if rabid transphobes are a minority in larger population, there are enough of them that if you can get them to see you as their champion (ideally with plausibly deniable dog whistles) you can make bank
“Some liberals would rather throw their lot in with the same people they spent the whole Trump administration calling the scourge of the earth than take a moral stance for trans people.”
Good morning, the Washington Post confirmed my reporting on 303 Creative:
There’s a lot of astonishing mess here, but the idea that “protecting democracy” and “confronting racism” are separate problems right now… is the problem
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Replying to @RadioFreeTom
You'll hate to hear it, but sweeping, elegaic discussions of racism are a luxury for when democracy is safe, not for when it's teetering on a cliff. This is triage. Build coalitions instead of holding seminars on CRT on cable TV. It's less fulfilling, but it's more effective. /9
“What we know is that what is alleged is that she was in the hospital and had a miscarriage and divulged some information to hospital staff, who then reported her to the police. And then she was arrested and her bail was set at half a million dollars.”
I never tweet about her, but I want to give some recognition to my therapist, who, when I tried to describe a dasharez0ne meme I was really needing to "bring into the conversation," she just said, quite credibly, "I think... I know that one"
don't think we're gonna survive this if we can't learn to tell diff between ppl who don't share our views and ppl who don't want us to exist
These kinds of viral threads are a tangled mess of good intentions, wild exaggeration, and some tech doomerism that probably just amps up stress. Turn to folks who actually have been doing this work—like Digital Defense Fund. digitaldefensefund.org
I love Columbus for a lot and
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Son w dad who was detained released to applause. Green card holder from Sudan. Cancer patient in immunotherapy. Held for four hours.
*stares along with all of sex work twitter directly into the camera*
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says any move to block content based on political or social views would stoke fears of abuse bloom.bg/2N3SVff
It did not take long for the anti-sex worker rights discourse to swing to claiming that the mass murder of women working at massage parlors in Atlanta, where buying sex is a crime, is “the reason buying sex must remain a crime”
Eric Adams getting booed at Brooklyn Pride is gay rights
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Replying to @JCColtin
And the boos and jeers for Eric Adams just got way more intense around 5th Street. Somebody threw an empty water bottle at him.
0:08
It is because the media remains disproportionately straight and cis that the last few week's white nationalist attacks on LGBTQ community events are still so persistently framed as a "culture war"
Like, isn’t this clear after 2020? A disinfo campaign isn’t just about selling a lie, it’s about organizing people around a lie—it’s a strategy to amass power. That’s why you can’t fact check disinfo away. The people using disinfo as a strategy need to be confronted politically.
The attack on a Pride event in Dallas on Saturday, at a family-friendly drag show in a gay neighborhood, has set the stage for the far right, in any city or town, to launch their own Pizzagate. More from me here:
In NYC, press credentials are issued by the NYPD (I know), and they just told me they have suspended new applications for credentials "until further notice."
“...after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.” nytimes.com/2020/11/07/us/
Per Chelsea's team: "This photo is also the preferred image to use in stories about Chelsea moving forward for the time being."
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Okay, so here I am everyone!! =P
instagram.com/p/BUPbwX0htrw/
#HelloWorld
A notable turning point: when roughly half the people in America, many reeling from being robbed of something they were told was their birthright, were told by a columnist at the country’s most powerful newspaper that trans women are set to replace them.
Google employee: “most queer creators’ channels are demonetized or marked ‘adult’ because they use words like ‘trans’” twitter.com/gaywonk/status
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Breaking news from me: after TX Gov Abbott and AG Paxton's new directive to investigate gender-affirming care as child abuse, at least one Texas family with a trans child is already under investigation. Now, that family is taking the state to court.
We (“we”… ok, really the mainstream LGBTQ/gender justice infrastructure) aren’t prepared enough to respond to this weaponization of administrative law—as in Texas—and to respond to the kinds of criminalization coming, which many in org leadership haven’t faced themselves.
The NYT enabling anti-trans politics isn’t really them trying to appeal to the right, I think, but trying to make “just asking questions” a mainstream position.
It’s quaint that anyone concludes women freelancing in media undercharge because no one has told them about math twitter.com/xavierck3d/sta
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If they are "freed up" at all now that they have won compulsory motherhood, they have already turned toward anti-LGBTQ politics and broader Christian nationalist efforts to undermine the public good—education, health care, voting—
I feel empowered by a woman president the same way I feel empowered by women cops.
If you are writing to ask my advice on how to best represent sex workers in your creative projects, no need to offer to buy me a coffee—my absolutely free advice is, hire them as creative consultants.
Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist writer who has spent at least five years on this site waging misogynist harassment campaigns against sex workers and trans women, as if it were all she had for a content strategy... is finally suspended.
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There’s people I’ve worked with and respect on the Opinion desk. And some of us are in the same union. If there’s anything that can be done from the outside to help any of you stop this on the inside, I hope you’ll reach out.
Hi, good morning, particularly to the few hundred new people. I’m one of the first journalists to cover the intersection of sex work and tech, including anti-sex work politics and platform discrimination. But a lot of us have been thinking about this for a long, long time.
“as though Butler has just started looking into these issues” says the guy who was in elementary school when GENDER TROUBLE came out
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Ditum, who regards all sex work as paid rape, advises wives to fuck their husbands even if you they don’t really want to (for free)
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I feel sick, so, forgive me if 1000 other ppl already had this on their mind tonight
hot union summer starts now
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The workers of The Atlantic are unionizing with @nyguild today. I’m so proud to stand with my colleagues.
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All the examples in the story—including this one—involve armed far right groups menacing communities. In this example, an antifascist group is armed in response to armed far right groups. Is that violence? Is that self-defense?
How could anyone have predicted that the anti-trafficking laws some feminists embraced would be deployed post-Roe washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/
This is extraordinary: the Voice reporter who brought Brandon Teena’s story to a national audience re-opens her notebooks to correct her own (now acknowledged) anti-trans bias.
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This isn’t to say what’s going on now isn’t fascist. It’s that we need not look outside our own history.
Exclusive: For the first time we now know—a majority of voters *support decriminalizing sex work* along w 2/3rds of Dems and under-45's. That's from a new poll out later today. What this all means, and how we got here:
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The campaign against OnlyFans is part of a larger project: it’s not about ending violence and abuse, and it’s not about sex negativity or controlling women (though that’s part of it)—it’s about fighting to establish a fundamentalist Christian nation newrepublic.com/article/160488
Something striking about the role of “fearless truth-teller!” getting rewritten around newsletters by former media staffers doing stenography for white supremacy while local reporters are getting bodyslammed by cops for just showing up with cameras after police kill Black people
If Frank Bruni wonders how the GOP seized on trans rights as a “new” culture war he could ask Frank Bruni, who when asked the morning after in 2016 if Trump won because of “transgender bathrooms” said this was a “boutique issue” and Dems needed to do some “soul-searching”
The story really is: why non-sex working women’s feet get pirated into fetish content they can’t profit from while fetish models’ content produced with their consent gets shadowbanned and demonetized
Hello! My next book is called A WOMAN IS AGAINST THE LAW—and here's the official announcement:
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While I was working on this story this morning, CPS showed up at the door of one mom in Texas I am in touch with. This is all going down very fast.
Gentle addition to the “millennial burnout” convo: what if it has less to do w the generation you were born to and more to do w being raised to be a useful and attractive component to capital
How much less copaganda would there be in journalism if we were more honest about the difference between “reducing crime” and “reducing violence”?
At the Stonewall Inn where there’s hundreds of people here way before the protest kicks off, in honor of Black trans people who have killed by police and other acts of violence—Tony McDade, Nina Pop
good night and everyone who is in jail or prison should’ve been able to vote
Attorneys at JFK Terminal 4 told me they were forbidden by Port Authority police from holding signs like this.
“Broke the law because my survival was criminalized” already was a pretty big feminist constituency, only growing as the carceral net expands
This cover story appears to have been beamed in from some alternate reality where all trans health care is always accessible, affordable, and destigmatized – and imagines it as a dystopia
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Your child says she’s trans. She wants hormones and surgery. She’s 13 years old. What do you do? @jessesingal reports in our most recent cover story:
Feels important right now to emphasize that those would-be stormtroopers threatening Pride are not invulnerable, are not masterminds, and have been humiliated and defeated more often than not this this year:
Civility was def the big mood that night in Jan 1991 when he lit Baghdad up for CNN, I was 13 and petrified and had no idea we’d be at war more or less forever, thx for the memories Brian!!!
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CNN's complete obit for George H.W. Bush: "His death marks not only the passing of a president but a reminder of a bygone era of greater civility in Washington." cnn.com/2018/12/01/pol
I interviewed , , , , & , about porn, rape and stigma.
Please recall that Cloudflare only ended their business with the Daily Stormer after Unite the Right in 2017, but in 2018 it took them mere weeks to boot off an indie sex worker community after FOSTA.
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20
vice.com/en/article/9kg
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Cloudflare launched nearly twelve years ago. Over that time, our set of services has become much more complicated. With that complexity we have developed policies around how we handle abuse of different features Cloudflare provides cfl.re/3TtwgeK
Harvey Milk wanted free municipal transit in San Francisco. Today is the 38th anniversary of his assassination. Ghosts are incredible.
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SF's bus and transit system hacked with ransomware. Rides are free for now. MUNI says it doesn't know the demands. sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/11/26/you
After he yelled “it used to be legal to kill gay people” at a woman and her wife, and she later saw him carrying a gun, she learned her community already ID’d his Gab account and were collecting screenshots. Police acted after they were handed all of this.
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Mary Doe, one of the plaintiffs, works for the TX State Dept of Family and Protective Services. She asked her supervisor how this policy would impact her job. She also has a trans daughter. Then: DFPS put her on leave. And investigators came to her home. newrepublic.com/article/165538
The “just asking questions about criminal justice reform” guy is just one rung on a ladder usually
